Warriors begin beach workouts

Waikiki Beach can be a natural recruiting tool for the Hawaii basketball program.

It is also a natural training area.

The Warriors held a hard workout in the soft sand at Waikiki Beach last weekend as part of their preseason training. They went through various running and jumping drills for about an hour, and then ended the workout with a competitive game of two-hand touch football.

“We do this every Saturday morning at 6 a.m.,” Hawaii head coach Gib Arnold said. “We just get here before anybody else gets here, and we just have a real good hour-long workout. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also really hard because you’re doing it on the beach.”

It was an eye-opening experience for many of the new Warriors, and not just because they had to wake up at 5:30 a.m. for the workout.

“I’m not used to this back home,” said freshman Shaquille Stokes, who is from Harlem, N.Y. “My dad used to tell me to run the beach, but I never did. It’s tough. The beach is tough.”

The once-a-week beach workouts will continue until early October, and it will culminate in a “King of the Beach” competition among the players. They will battle each other in various beach drills, and the winner will get his name on a perpetual trophy. Bill Amis won it last year.

7 Comments

Thanks Dayton, I can hardly believe what I saw. It just simply too good to be true!

‘Warriors’: If you keep it all up.. successfully complete your eligibility in UH, you will truly be the ‘Champions’. Of course you knew that.
Who will be the ‘King of the Beach’? All of you have equal chance, but only who has tried his best deserves that but, each of you is the ‘Prince of the Beach’!

As a member of your ‘Ohana’ and your parent/family are proud of all of you; All ‘former Warriors’ will live a successful life. Of course we knew that.

By the way, the Parsing the WAC blog reports today that Gerry Blakes has enrolled at ABCD Prep in Dallas, and either will or might be headed to Hawai’i later on (two different Twitter sources = two different scenarios, but it all seems like speculation at this point).

Such a great concept; why not use Waikiki as a backdrop and proving ground for a workout. Thanks for waking up so early and documenting this again, Dayton. You should try to post this on YouTube or something; it’d be a great recruiting tool.

this should be used as a recruiting video. as shaq said, ‘only in hawaii’ workouts aren’t supposed to be fun, right? the team looked like they were having fun. what recruit wouldn’t want to be having a morning workout on waikiki beach?